Börte had been quiet long enough that Temüjin knew she was working up to something.
They were lying in the grass on the high ground east of the camp, where the land fell away and you could see a day's ride in any direction, and below them the herds had begun drifting back toward the carts the way they did when the light started to go. It was the best hour this country had, and he had known it within days—everything unbearable about the place happened under the noon sun, and everything worth having happened after it.
"You're looking east again," Börte said.
"Am I."
"You've done it four times."
He had not known she was counting. He did not like that at all, and he did not answer, and he went on looking east—because somewhere out along a road he had read about in another life, his father was dying, and there was nothing whatsoever to be done about it from a hilltop in Onggirat country.
He stood up and dusted off his clothes.
"Alright, we've wasted enough time. Let's go back." He offered Börte his hand. She slapped it away.
"Do you really think I would let you hold my hand?" she said, with a smirk.
"Worth the try," Temüjin said, shrugging.
They walked to their horses and started down the hill. He silently thanked this body for remembering how to handle a horse. Without the muscle memory he would have drawn eyes the moment he reached for the stirrup, and a boy who had forgotten how to ride was a boy something had got into.
In his past life, a parent would be arrested for leaving a nine-year-old alone with a horse, let alone putting him on one. Here it was not neglect. It was instruction. The country did not allow for a safe and coddled upbringing, and riding was not a skill you acquired. It was survival.
Horses were an inseparable part of a Mongol's life. They were an extension of the body. You travelled with them, fought with them, and rested your soul against them. A Mongol child learned to ride by the age of three, and long before they were grown they could sleep in the saddle without falling out of it.
Temüjin held his black mare, Khar, to the winding path. Where the ground levelled out at the foot of the hill he nudged her into a trot. Börte came up behind him and pushed her horse until she was alongside.
"You'll be here for the winter camp," Börte said. It was not a question. "Everyone hobbles camels. Even you."
"I won't be here in winter."
He heard it after it was out, which was becoming a habit.
Börte turned her head. "What?"
"Someone will come for me. From my clan." He kept his eyes on the path. "In a few days."
"Nobody's coming for you." She said it flatly, the way you correct a child about something obvious. "You're ours until you're grown. That's the whole point of you being here."
"I know what the point of me is."
"Then you know nobody's coming." She let that sit a moment. Then, with narrowed eyes: "And we hardly have any visitors these days. So how do you know that?"
"If I tell you, would you let me hold your hand?" He turned to her, teasing.
"Hah! In your dreams! I'm not that curious anyway." She galloped past him, her laughter trailing behind her.
"Wait for me!" Temüjin shouted, urging Khar to follow. "Is that how you treat your future husband?"
By the time they reached the camp the sun had gone. He could just make out the carts drawn up in a ring around the gers, and two young women driving the last of the livestock into the open ground inside it. A wedge of firelight fell across the grass whenever someone went in or out of a ger. There was no other light anywhere.
The horses came first. A man saw to his mount before he saw to himself, and Temüjin had worked out in his first week here that failing to do so was the sort of small thing people remembered about a person. So he walked Khar cool, checked her hooves by feel in the failing light, and let her drink before he let himself think about food.
After the horses, there was still the evening to get through.
Börte handed her reins to a boy of about six and vanished between the gers without saying goodbye. That was normal. She had never once said goodbye to him.
"You're back late."
A woman had come around the side of the nearest cart with something heavy in both arms, and she said it the way people say things to a child they have known a long time. Half scolding. Entirely unbothered.
Temüjin smiled at her. "We lost the light."
"You lost the light." She snorted. "The pair of you would lose your heads."
She went on past him toward the fire, and he watched her go, and he had no idea who she was.
That was the work. Not the riding, not the words in his mouth—those had come with the body, unearned. It was this. Every conversation was a room he had to cross without touching anything, and the method he had settled on was to be warm, and to be vague, and above all never to say a name.
Aunt. Cousin. Servant. One of Dei Sechen's wives. She could have been any of them. She had spoken to him with the roughness of long acquaintance and he had answered without committing to a single fact, and she had gone away satisfied, and tomorrow he would have to do it again.
It had not got easier. He had assumed it would.
The ger where he slept sat on the western side of the ring. He stopped at the door.
Not for long. A heartbeat, no more. But he stopped, and he made himself lift his foot properly over the threshold instead of scuffing across it, and only then did he go in.
The body did not help with this. That was the part he had not expected. It knew horses. It knew the shape of the language. It did not know that the threshold of a ger was not a piece of wood but a thing with meaning attached, and that to tread on it was the kind of insult a household remembered for a generation.
Inside, everything was rule. The fire at the centre, which nothing unclean ever went into. The far side facing the door, which belonged to the head of the household and to guests who mattered. West for men, east for women. And a betrothed boy of nine, who was not a guest and not yet family and would not be family until he came back for Börte in some year that had not happened yet, sat where he was put.
He knew all of it. He had read all of it, once, in a warm room, in a century that had not been built yet.
Knowing it and doing it were not the same thing. He thought about it every time, and he was fairly sure the thinking showed.
It showed to Börte.
She was already inside, legs folded under her, working at a harness strap with her fingers. She looked up when he came in.
"You do that every time," she said.
"Do what?"
"Stop at the door." She went back to the strap. "Like you're counting something."
Temüjin sat down and said nothing, which was the only move available to him and not a good one.
"You never used to," she said, to the harness. "Before you were sick."
The fire popped. Somewhere outside a camel complained about something and was ignored.
"I don't remember being sick," Temüjin said.
That was true. It was the most useful true thing he owned, and he had been spending it carefully since the day he woke up in this body with a mouth full of a language he had never studied and a fever cooling out of him.
Börte made a small noise that could have meant anything at all, and did not look up again, and let it go.
She let it go the way a person sets something down where they can find it later.
Later, when the fire was banked and the household had gone quiet around him, he went into the palace.
That was what the technique was called in the books he had read. A memory palace. You built a building inside your head and you walked it until the walk was as worn as a footpath, and then you put the things you needed to keep in particular places inside it. A fact on a shelf. A date on a windowsill. A man's name hung on a peg beside a door. When you wanted it back you did not rummage for it. You went to the room and looked at the spot where you had left it.
Nobody on this side of the world would use it for another four hundred years. It needed no paper and no ink and no script—these people had no writing—and it needed no one to be told. It was the one piece of the future he had been able to bring across whole, and he had started building it in his first month here, when it became clear how much he was going to have to hold and for how long.
It had a door. It had a corridor, and rooms off the corridor. Near the front he kept what was coming soon. Further back, in rooms he made himself walk through once a week so the way to them would not go vague, he kept the things that were twenty and thirty and forty years off.
It gave back exactly what he had put into it and not one thing more. It was not an oracle and it could not be asked. Everything in it had come out of books written eight hundred years after tonight, and when it ran out it would simply be a building.
It was entirely inside his head and it was the only building he had ever owned.
Tonight he did not go far in. He stood in the first room and looked at the one thing there that would not stop being true.
Somewhere east of here, his father had taken food from Tatars on a road, because you ate what was offered, because that was the rule and the rule was older than anyone alive.
After that the order of it was fixed. He would ride on. He would reach home. He would not get better. A man would be sent with a story about Hoelun being ill, and Temüjin would have to stand there and be told.
He knew the order. He did not know how much of it had already happened—whether his father was still in the saddle tonight, or lying in his own ger with the thing working in him, or dead, and a rider saddling in the dark.
Soon. Within the week, probably.
He could not do better than that. The people who wrote it down had not thought the day was worth writing.
- ger — the round, felt-covered lattice tent the Mongols lived in. Not merely a shelter but a household with fixed places inside it: the hearth at the centre, the far side facing the door for the head of the household and for guests who matter, the west side for men and the east for women.
- threshold — the raised sill of a ger's door. It is stepped over, never trodden on; to tread on it is a lasting insult to the household.
- Onggirat — Börte's people, and Temüjin's hosts. A tribe of the eastern steppe long in the habit of marrying its daughters outward rather than fighting for position.
- Tatars — a powerful confederation of the eastern Mongolian plateau, and the standing enemies of Temüjin's line.
- Khar — the name of Temüjin's black mare. The word means black.